I did some research to figure out why my transfer speeds are so slow on my USB 3.0 1TB HDD connected to my router via USB. Initially it was formatted as NTFS, but I was told that EXT3 would provide faster speeds. It does seem faster, but still rather slow, especially for large files (4GB files). The HDD I have is an external 5400 RPM drive.

My network is completely gigabit. My tomato version is:

Tomato Firmware 1.28.0000 MIPSR2-101 K26 USB Mega-VPN

Does anyone know how I can get faster speeds for data transfers on this drive? Sorry if this is a frequent or newbie question, but I wasn't able to find any answers on my own. Thanks in advance for any help.

Why my transfer speeds are so slow on my USB 3.0 2TB HDD connected to my router via USB.
Initially it was formatted as NTFS, but I was told that EXT3 would provide faster speeds.
If you get 13-15 Mb that is very god for a router. If you want faster get a NAS

Try reencoding your videos with handbrake. Use a constant quality setting you find acceptable. I use 22 for 720p and 1080p. Then in the advanced tab add settings for vbv-maxrate and possibly vbv-bufsize. I find for my network setup both 720p and 1080p will play consistently with:

For 720P:
vbv-maxrate=5000

For 1080P:
vbv-maxrate=10000

For 480P I use the settings:
vbv-maxrate=2184:vbv-bufsize=4368

The 480P settings are actually what I used to use with my NSLU2 which had much slower transfer, and wireless routing. I still use those settings because I find they work for about everything.

I find to play 1080P I really must encode with my settings. I could never get 1080P to work with wifi, but it usually works for my plugged networking. For 720P is a crap shoot. I usually try playing videos from other sources. If they don't play I then reencode with my standard settings.

The other thing that makes a huge difference is the protocol. I find I get best results streaming with lighttpd. Next best is SAMBA. NFS would seem like a good choice, bit I haven't had good luck with it. FTP is a lousy choice. While you might get good downloading rates with FTP, it is not a streaming protocol. So as soon has you hit rewind you start skipping backwards, you are likely to freeze or crash your client. I would also expect since FTP clients generally just request the whole file, that the error correction blocks would also cause skips and crashes. You want protocol where your client will request manageable block sizes. So even if one block freezes they can be requesting the next block in a different thread, and hopefully have all the data needed by the time your video player reaches that point in the buffer.

As most others have commented if you want more than 10 MB/s you probably need a dedicated NAS designed for that. But you don't need over 10MB/s to stream most videos at reasonable quality.